Art that goes pop

New CDs from Mistle Thrush and Curious Ritual

by Brett Milano

Not long ago, I would have pegged Mistle Thrush and Curious Ritual as good examples of bands doing very different things with the same basic ingredients. Both had ethereal female singers, guitarists fond of echoes and soundscapes, songs that weren't quite literal or quite pop. But Mistle Thrush tended to land on the more delicate and tuneful side of the coin, whereas Curious Ritual had a more aggressive, art-rock bent.

Now, with new releases out -- Mistle Thrush's Super Refraction (Egg) and Curious Ritual's five-song EP Get with It Girl (Dahlia) -- each outfit is moving onto the other's territory. Get with It Girl is more flat-out pop than usual for Curious Ritual, sporting streamlined arrangements, straightforward lyrics, and -- for the ultimate in indie-pop credibility -- a Guided by Voices cover. Meanwhile, Mistle Thrush (who headline T.T. the Bear's Place this Saturday, June 14, with Boy Wonder and the Tender Idols) have grown some teeth. Their best by some distance, this third disc sports some cosmetic changes. In a nutshell, the songs are better and the band sound louder, but there's also a feistier side to their personality that never came through before.

"We didn't want to get hung up on noodling," drummer Todd Demma explains over lunch at Allston's Sunset Grill. "Maybe our natural tendencies are coming out more. In the past we held back our tendencies to be more aggressive."

Why hold themselves from rocking out?

"Because we didn't think we could do it well," admits singer Valerie Forgione. "Maybe we went with the prettier things because we knew we could do that."

There's still a lot of prettiness on Super Refraction -- it's hard to avoid with Forgione's voice up front. But Demma gets to play some meatier rhythms, and a pair of tracks, "Train Song" and "Sha Sha," end with long bursts of guitar noise. The most jarring thing, however, isn't part of the album proper. It's a 20-minute secret track at the end that producer Kurt Ralske created from heavily doctored loops and samples of Forgione's voice. Broken into random syllables, the voices echo and snip around one another. The effect is purposely disorienting and a little scary.

"I heard it first at three in the morning, heard myself singing words I didn't sing," Forgione offers. "There are a lot of backwards tapes in it as well. I was afraid somebody would kill himself and we'd get blamed."

Equally surprising is the venom that shows up in some of the lyrics. The opening "Stupid Song" is the band's first full-fledged rocker, joining a lovers' quarrel already in progress ("Stop bothering me with your stupid eyes" is the opening shot). The same argument is still going on in the album's last official track, "Making Salt with Sunshine," a deceptively calm acoustic tune whose chorus is "I'd rather be alone than deal with any of this." Both songs fit right into the pop tradition of venting about bad relationships, but in the past Forgione couldn't let herself write this frankly.

"Those feelings were always there, but we used to prettify them more," Demma offers. "It comes with age," Forgione adds. "I'm more cynical now than I've ever been, so it's coming out in full force. And I'm constantly being let down by people, so that's bound to come out. Both of those songs came from an abusive relationship I was in; it got pretty tumultuous. I'm not good at telling people off, so it comes out more easily in the songs. I'm more confident now. That comes with the cynicism: here's who I am, too bad if you don't like it.' "

Forgione's real love nowadays is for exotic keyboards and sounds; she sneaked a theremin into a few tracks on the new album and wants to get some old synths and Mellotrons on the next one. Demma notes, "She'll be bringing them on stage soon; we'll build an altar for her -- oops, scratch that word. Definitely not an altar." The band, you see, want to get away from anything with gothic associations.

"I was never into that vampire thing," Forgione says. "I couldn't see us being a dark, tragic band. To me that was something from long ago, that genre-fication of Mistle Thrush. You have to take yourself very seriously to fit into that, and we never did."

"Plus, we like bright colors," Demma concludes.

Bad relationships also figure into the title track of Curious Ritual's EP, which singer Linda Jung wrote to urge a friend to dump an abusive boyfriend. It's the first song they've written that sounds like an anthem -- or at least a radio hit -- and they've framed it with four other tunes in the same vein, keeping the garage guitars and the tricky art-rock arrangements of last year's God Hilliard album to a minimum. The cover tune, "Volcano Divers," marks the first time anyone's dared to put lush production on a GbV song, and it works. Curious Ritual's disc also has a secret track, but a considerably lighter one than Mistle Thrush's; written for the local cable show Dirty Laundry, it's their first and only surf instrumental.

Still, guitarist Sean O'Brien insists that Curious Ritual haven't turned into a pop band -- just that they wound up doing it this time around. "The next album could be 20-minute concept pieces for all we know. Those happen in our rehearsal space all the damn time. The feeling was never `We need to make a pop record,' just `Guess we had that short pop song in us today.' Especially with that [title] song, when we finished writing it we felt like `Huh, we did that?' Which is fine with us, we take it as it comes."

The production team of Robert Fisher (Dahlia owner) and Malcolm Travis (former Sugar/Kustomized drummer) likewise accented their straightforward side, though it doesn't quite have the mile-high drum sound of the Sugar albums. "Robert said something we thought was interesting. He said that most producers would play up the spacious psychedelic angle we've got. But he thought we'd still sound spacious and psychedelic even if we were recorded completely dry, so we might as well focus on the songs."

Eclecticism has always been a mixed blessing for Curious Ritual, who still haven't quite found their niche after seven years together. "The bad part of that is that no particular scene has snatched us up and made us its own," O'Brien says. "The good part is that we feel we can do anything we want to do. A lot of bands feel they have to break up when they want to try something different; we can try it without breaking up."

ACOUSTIC BUFFALO TOM

In view of the number of acoustic songs in Buffalo Tom's repertoire, it's surprising they've never done a full-fledged acoustic show, save for a couple of short promotional gigs. They'll take the plunge this Friday, June 13, for a pair of shows at the Brattle Theatre. Expect the usual mix of old and new material, but with a couple of differences. They've got an album's worth of new songs to draw from, and they've added a full-time keyboard player (Phil Aiken, late of the Groundswells). And the old songs they'll play aren't necessarily the ones that were already acoustic.

"There's nothing revealing about doing those; we'd just make them sound like the record," says singer/guitarist Bill Janovitz. "We've been trying out more unlikely things, like `Taillights Fade.' And something like `Bleeding Heart' [from their second album Birdbrain], which we wrote to be a big rock anthem, but it sounds pretty good if you strip it down."

Buffalo Tom are currently living on their live shows, since the next album is a while away. They left Elektra after the disappointing sales of the last release, Sleepy Eyed; they nearly signed to another major label this year, but negotiations fell through. Now a third label is looking to sign them, but such things can drag on. "When people hear you're in record-label limbo," Janovitz explains, "they assume you've been dropped or you're in litigation. But that's not the case with us -- just that you can get hung up on small points and it takes forever. Which is exactly what's happening."

Meanwhile, they're working on a split single with Teenage Fanclub, with the two bands covering each other (Buffalo Tom chose two Fanclub songs, "Eternal Light" and "Guiding Star"). And Janovitz figures his band have picked a good time to take a breather. "Honestly, I haven't felt this out of touch with radio and TV since I was in college. At the time, I felt the mainstream had nothing to offer me, until R.E.M. broke through to the Top 40; then it got interesting for a while. Now it's back to the netherland. Even the bands I like aren't on the radio -- I saw Wilco last winter [at Avalon], the place was packed, and they're not even getting on adult-alternative radio."

Still, Buffalo Tom hope to start an album in the fall. "We still want to make one with big-time production. Not necessarily big sonically, just to take our time and make it great."

COMING UP

Jayuya have their CD-release party at the Middle East tonight (Thursday), with Trona and Crown Electric Company guesting. Meanwhile, the biggest band ever to play O'Brien's, Sam Black Church, are back there again; Sweetie and Serum are at Mama Kin, and the Push Stars are at T.T. the Bear's Place . . . The Stanton Park label throws a bash at Club Bohemia Friday with the Devotions, the Varmints, the Doom Buggies, and Kenne Highland. Underrated popster and Boston expatriate Matt Keating is at the bottom of a T.T.'s bill; Tree and 3 Girls do a Sound Museum party at the Middle East, and Barrence Whitfield shakes up Johnny D's . . . Rude fun at the Rat on Saturday with Roadsaw, Ass Tractor, and the new band Half Cocked (with former Plush and Malachite members). Karate and Victory at Sea are upstairs at the Middle East with Laurie Geltman downstairs; the Country Bumpkins are at the Linwood, and Delta Clutch and Jeff & Jane are at the Attic.

History's first synth-pop duo, the Silver Apples, make their reappearance upstairs at the Middle East Sunday; modern psychedelicists the Apples in Stereo are downstairs . . . Reggae great Toots Hibbert brings his Maytals to the House of Blues on Monday . . . the Sterlings do the pop thing at Bill's Bar on Tuesday; Ben Lee does the same at the Middle East . . . On Wednesday the formidable New Orleans blueswoman Marva Wright hits the House of Blues, with Crescent City keyboard kingpin Sammy Berfect in her band. And the man who gave the world "How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away," Dan Hicks, is at Johnny D's.